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World on a Wire

Film/Video

"A textbook example of a film that was ahead of its time…anticipates Blade Runner in its meditation on artificial and human intelligence and The Matrix in its conception of reality as a computer-generated illusion."—New York Times

The theatrical release of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire is one of the most-anticipated film events of the past year. Originally produced for German television, this sci-fi thriller has been seen in only a handful of retrospectives since its initial broadcast. Fassbinder’s satirical take on the future mixes Stanley Kubrick, Phillip K. Dick, and Kurt Vonnegut in equal parts. His dystopian sci-fi noir follows a cybernetics engineer who uncovers a massive corporate/government conspiracy that threatens (virtual) reality as we know it. (212 mins., 35mm)

The rebellious wunderkind of German cinema from the late 1960s until his death (at age 37) in 1982, Fassbinder made over 44 films in his brief career. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) are among his best-known titles. World on a Wire was digitally restored by the Fassbinder Foundation under the supervision of the film’s original cameraman, Michael Ballhaus, a frequent collaborator with Fassbinder.